Devices which automatically predict lightning strikes that are based on local measurements of wind conditions are not known to the art. There are different technologies using different data and giving different types of results.
One alternative system utilizes projections of the future motion of storm cells. Lightning monitoring systems, which report the location of strikes, project the future location of thunderstorm cell clouds based upon current and anticipated future motion of storms. A limitation of this method is that the thunderstorm may have dissipated or changed its course before the predicted time.
Another alternative system is based upon the measurement of wind convergence to indicate the likelihood of future strikes. Wind convergence has been applied to a very wide region with strikes predicted to occur at unspecified locations somewhere within the entire region at an unspecified time in the near future. The performance figures of this method are systematically lower than those of the invention since the invention utilizes the entire wind field as input rather than a specialized product of the wind field, the convergence. Further, the wind convergence method is not automated and is not specific to predictions of lightning strikes in a set of different spatial regions at different times in the future. This method is also not improvable by retraining from data currently being collected from the same instrument array used to make predictions.